There are not too many bells and whistles on the EVGA
X58 SLI from a hardware feature viewpoint and considering the market for this
board, we think it is a good choice. The almost universal Realtek RTL-8111C PCIe Gigabit
Ethernet controllers are utilized in tandem, the Realtek ALC-889 is on board for
HD audio, JMicron’s JMB362/363 chipsets are tabbed for eSATA, IDE, and additional
SATA port duties. TI is selected for IEEE 1394a and the Intel ICH10R is utilized for primary storage purposes. We have never been real big fans of either
Realtek or JMicron, but considering the dearth of competition in the on-board peripheral
market, you make do with the provided choices.

The BIOS is designed to get the most out of the
board when overclocking. At first
glance, some of the available options like the number of memory timing options
seem sparse compared to the ASUS and Gigabyte offerings. However, EVGA does a very good job of
setting sub-timings to optimal points so far in our testing. We still prefer the ability to set additional
memory timings and skew levels ourselves, but we can certainly live with the
decisions made by the BIOS, although those at the bleeding edge of benchmarking
would probably prefer the additional control level in either the ASUS or
Gigabyte products.

In a nod to the users who like to cool their
systems via cascade or LN2, EVGA provides two different modes to properly set
the board at POST for sub-zero temperatures. Those who love or need voltages to improve
clock speeds will not have any problems with the choices provided by EVGA. DRAM voltages sky rocket up to 3.075V and VCore
goes to a nice silicon melting 2.3000V. VDroop
control can be enabled or disabled.

Also, you can fine tune the frequency level on the
digital PWMs. We normally left it at
800KHz to help reduce temperatures in the CPU area but switched 1067KHz when
overclocking our i920 past 4GHz. We were
able to get an additional 80MHz out of our CPU on air by switching from 800 to
1067 once we passed 4GHz. EVGA also
provides a setting called a dummy overclock, quite simply, enable this setting
and the board will set itself to run a 20x160 overclock on the i920. We found the settings to be perfectly stable
in our initial benchmarks.

EVGA also supports a stock 1333MHz memory speed on
the i920/i940 processors along with opening up QPI link speeds from a standard
4.800 GT/s up to 6.400 GT/s, which is standard on the i965 Extreme processor. We were disappointed with the lack of OC
profiles in the initial BIOS, but a BIOS update today allows a total of eight
profiles to be saved. Other problems raised in our blog preview have
also been solved as of today with BIOS IX58SZ13. We are at the point in testing now that we
have moved past bug finding and resolution to fine tuning our settings for
performance oriented results.

Finally, the board fully supports 12GB of DDR3
memory. We have not had any real
problems running 12GB of our Corsair, Patriot, or GSkill DDR3-1600 kits up to
1600 at 8-8-8-24 1T timings, although we needed about 1.70V for absolute stability. Dropping the command rate to 2T allows 1.65V
operation with the current BIOS. Psssttt…
keeping CPU VTT voltage in proper sync with VDimm along with the right level of VCore
and that nasty 1.65V VDimm guidance can go away, although the blue suits still
say it is a potential warranty buster.

One last item of note, at least in
this first look, is that the three PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots will operate in x16/x16
mode for 2x SLI/CF if the third x16 slot is empty. If you decide to place a PCIe RAID, network,
audio, or TV tuner card in the third x16 slot, then the 2x SLI/CF configuration
will operate in x16/x8 mode. We did not
notice any performance differences between the two modes with our HD 4870 or GTX
260 cards. 3x SLI/CF configurations will
run in x16/x8/x8 mode. You can also use the first and third x16 slots for graphics if you need to open up a PCI slot but the board will run in x16/x8 mode. Although the
owner’s manual states the three x16 slots are for graphics cards only, we had no problems running our ASUS Xonar D2X
or Highpoint Rocket RAID cards in x16 slot two or three.